


draw not your bow till your arrow is fixed

by katydidmischief (cassiejamie)



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Family, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiejamie/pseuds/katydidmischief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is, as much as Oliver tries, he is not the man that'd grown up with Tommy, the man that had played silly games with Thea, that'd partied hard and dyed his hair a steady bottle blonde.</p>
            </blockquote>





	draw not your bow till your arrow is fixed

The thing is, as much as Oliver tries, he is not the man that'd grown up with Tommy, the man that had played silly games with Thea, that'd partied hard and dyed his hair a steady bottle blonde. How could he be, after what he'd learned, what he'd been forced to do to survive there in Purgatory?

(This party is too loud, too crowded, and too many women are hanging off him like fucking limpets. If it weren't for the fact that he's attempting to resurrect his playboy image, he'd shake them off and lose them in the melee, but he makes himself stay right there. At least, until Tommy pulls him out of the fray and into a corner.

"Come on," he half-shouts, "Let's go."

Where, Oliver doesn't know. He doesn't really care.)

That said, it takes a while for Laurel to catch on, her anger having clouded her mind; it takes several nights of talk with Tommy to filter out the patented Oliver Queen bullshit defense—she's schooled enough in it—and acknowledge that there's something going on behind the mask.

Thankfully, not the hooded mask: he doesn't know how he'd protect her, protect Tommy, or Thea or his mother if Laurel were to figure it out. Honestly, one card falls, the rest will follow and he can't...

"Hey, here," Laurel murmurs, handing over a glass of wine to his trembling fingers. (Flashback. Fucking flashbacks.)

"This really isn't necessary."

She gives him a look and he takes a sip.

They've gone back to Tommy's apartment, the wide space lit warmly by the fireplace a few dimmed overheads; the lights cast the room in an red-orange glow and it's so different from nightfall on the island that he begins to relax. Behind him, Laurel settles onto the couch, thinking this is another thing about Oliver she'd have missed if she'd remained in her bitter place, fooled by his words, this new behavior—Oliver had never sat on floors when given the option of a chair. Perhaps, she thinks, the hard surfaces remind him of something safe.

Tommy joins them, showered and changed and he swig half a glass of the red in one go, before sliding down beside Laurel on the couch.

For a while, they're quiet, but as always, it burns Tommy to see Oliver so quiet and he pulls at Oliver until he settles between them, leaning back into the cushions.

(They can see he's fading out of reality and Laurel shifts close, whispering to him things that she hopes makes him feel safe; Tommy merely rubs a spot on Oliver's neck with his thumb, his hand splayed out between Oliver's shoulderblades. He feels a scar under the pad of his index finger, a line of thickened tissue, and he sighs, waiting for Oliver to come out of it.)

Laurel calls it PTSD, what Oliver's got and Tommy's sure she's right—she usually is—but he hopes she's wrong. Because PTSD? That's forever and Oliver can't live like this forever, haunted and secretive. Holding everything in when there's so much... too much... burdening Oliver's mind. Granted Tommy's not the most talkative himself, but even he understands that what Oliver lived through was trial by fire and he needs to get it out, more than the tidbits and morsels he's dropped here and there.

Of course, that's a gift horse, because the little bits that Oliver gives them come laden with bitterness, anger, pain. They come out in one line admissions that he doesn't explain and leaves them to wonder what else he'd suffered.

They do so now, as Oliver snaps out of his memories and blinks, schools his breathing, admits, "My father shot himself," and then rises to his feet. He moves to the floor-to-ceiling window and looks out at Starling City, back to them for a moment, then he turns and swallows the rest of his glass.

"Oliver..."

The look he gives Laurel speaks volumes enough that she doesn't push it. What she does do is hold out her hand and pull him in, letting Oliver drop his head to her shoulder; he murmurs his apologies all over again, for hurting her, for Sarah, and tells her (and Tommy) to leave him be. They don't.

They won't.

Tommy leans over, kissing the crown of Oliver's head, and tells him, "Knock it off, okay? You know she's not going to let you push her away and I certainly am not going anywhere," before reaching for the remote. Sometimes the news will soothe Oliver, or distract him, and that's what they need right now.

Slowly, Oliver calms as the reporter talks about the vigilante Green Arrow and his latest interference. He sits up and comments, smiles thinly, and eventually, he says, "Put on something else," then pulls Laurel against his side, kissing her temple.

"Then we're going to continue your entertainment education with _Inception_ ," Tommy replies, shuffling through the DVDs already in the player, and flicks the movie on.

(Their nights typically follow this script.)

* * *

The daylight that flits through the windows is too bright for Oliver and he pulls a pillow over his head to block it out, thinking wistfully of his shelter on the island.

"Morning," Laurel murmurs, her face pressed against one of his arms; on his other side, Tommy snores loudly, an arm thrown over Oliver's side, fingers limp against Oliver's belly.

"Morning."

"Breakfast?"

He contemplates it, but his stomach twists and he thinks of last night, of too much wine, and shakes his head as he peels himself out of Tommy's grasp. "I'm going to go for a run."

"Take a bottle of water with you."

He goes, and alone with Tommy, Laurel sighs, "I know you're up."

"It's an illusion." He yawns and shifts, getting comfortable again. "He pass on breakfast again?"

"I shouldn't be surprised at this point."

Tommy rubs her shoulder with a hand and says, "We'll have a kick ass lunch. That'll make you feel better. Maybe the pizza place around the corner from you?" Oliver never says no to pizza.

She nods and settles down again, curling into his side; it feels like before, in the time before Oliver, when it was just the two of them and there was an empty slot neither could name—neither wanted to name—and she tries to push the melancholy from her mind.

"I have a billionaire to prosecute today," she mutters, "I need to get up."

"You should." he smirks approvingly when she cuddles closer instead of rising. "Or you could stay here for another fifteen minutes and not shower."

That gets her moving.

(She gets to the CNRI to hear that her latest case has been dismissed, the defendant in the case dead from the vigilante, and she smiles a little. She shouldn't. Oh, she shouldn't—there's justice and then there's revenge—but she does and spends the rest of the day finishing out paperwork on the next case.)

Lunchtime finds her watching the spectacle that is Oliver Queen attempting to conquer a pizza with Tommy, forks and knives dueling over pepperoni slices; she takes a picture and sends it to Thea, knowing how much the girl cherishes the few reminders that her big brother is still in there somewhere. The paps are bound to get their own photos, but Thea likes these ones better, the crappy cellphone ones with the pixelation and all.

She calls them family photos, the kind that families are supposed to have, and she's slowly garnering a small collection of them that she stores on her iPod to look through when she feels the distance between them too keenly.

"How's Thea?" she asks after the plates have been cleared away. She knows the answer already, but she wants to hear it from Oliver.

He doesn't answer, looking at her with the dark expression that she's learned means _Please don't._ It's an expression she's learned to ignore.

She opens her mouth to say something else, but Dig raps on the glass by their booth, gesturing toward his watch and Oliver takes the save for what it is. (Diggle is absurdly good at knowing when Oliver needs to be saved. Laurel's almost glad for it, with the company Oliver keeps.)

"Coming by for dinner?"

He nods. "I'll be home."

(This is not one of their normal days. No, this is better: Oliver's never called the apartment home before. He's not called anywhere home, not since the island, not with that inflection.)

* * *

Her next case is against billionaire Jonathan R. Black. He's an industrialist in the same vein that Oliver's father had once been, but his equipment had been manufactured from poor materials and several dozen of his designs were faulty to the point of negligence. His company had only issued recalls when forced by the government and Laurel wants this guy. Wants him hung by a jury for allowing the atrocities—children burned and sometimes killed by defective wiring, men left without the ability to work due to horrific injuries, families left homeless when their homes deemed unsafe—she wants him hung by his balls.

It's a bone-deep desire, one that has Laurel up at two in the morning doing research, compiling all her depositions...

"You should be asleep."

Oliver is awake, something which no longer bothers her: he sleeps in spurts, an hour here and an hour there; it's rare that they can get him to sleep the entire night. Normally, he'll lay in bed with them until he drifts off and when he wakes, he says, he hums songs or watches the stars out the windows. He sometimes gets up and plays a game of chess against the computer, reads the news, or watches some old movie. Sometimes he grabs the pint of ice cream she buys for him and eats the tub while laying on the couch.

"I'd say so should you, but we both know tonight is not one of your sleeping nights."

He shrugs even as he smiles and tells her, "Yes, well, I got some rest in today—you, miss, have been at the office all day and have to be back there soon enough."

"Come lay down with us?"

"My mother called. Thea's been brought back to the house via squad car."

He doesn't need to say that it's the third time in as many months nor that Thea's skirting the edge of what she can be protected from. She's too close to facing probation, jail time, or worse if her behavior doesn't change, and change radically, in the near future. She has been trying, Laurel knows, to stay out of trouble, but she's hanging with the wrong crowd, just as Oliver has said, and their pressures have put Thea on a dangerous path.

"I can drive you."

"You need to sleep."

"I'll wake up Tommy."

"Dig is already downstairs." He adjusts the collar on his jacket, adding, "I'll see you both tomorrow," before pressing a kiss to her lips and telling her to go to bed once more.

She doesn't listen, but Oliver'd expected that. Laurel doesn't listen to either himself or Tommy when it comes to her cases, and he loves that, the tenacity and the drive, about her.

(He wonders, as Dig drives them toward his mother's house and Thea's latest trouble, if she would think the same of him and his activities; he closes his eyes and zones out, pushes the thought from his mind and drifts off.

He dreams.

He remembers.

He wakes with a tightness in his chest and Dig looking at him from the front seat, and neither of them speaks: Dig knows what a flashback is like and he knows that if Oliver wants to talk, he will, but it's rare. Still, he nods toward the house, a silent question of whether or not he should just drive away.

Oliver shakes his head, reaching for the doorhandle.)

And she's still up when he comes home, daylight having broken as the clock passes seven. "It's a good thing you're off today," he mutters, kissing her softly.

"I'm not," she replies, but understands from the look he gives her that going in isn't an option—he's had Tommy call Joanna before, been locked in the apartment by her overly protective boyfriends more than once. Really, she'd be upset if it wasn't for the fact that those days? Yeah, they end up with most of the day spent in bed, tracing scars on Oliver's skin and whispering secrets into each others' skin.

They're really, _really_ good days.

* * *

It comes out in a rush, Dig dragging the two of them behind a column while Oliver dashes off with an army green duffel bag in hand. They're under fire, attacked by some group that wants Oliver Queen's head on a damned platter and Tommy has her under one arm, saying over and over, "Just keep your head down!" like it's a mantra.

An arrow flies by, sluicing through air with a low whistle that Laurel doubts she'd ever have heard if it hadn't whizzed past her ear with deadly accuracy. The guy it embeds in falls like a stone, then another and another cries out when he's struck in the knee and before she can think, it's over.

The strike team is left on the ground, writhing in pain or worse and when she lifts her head to the hooded figure, she catches Oliver's gaze.

"Laurel," Tommy calls before she can say anything, and when she glances back at him, she feels the wisp of a breeze and turns back to find that the Green Arrow is gone.

Oliver is gone.

She swallows and pales, knows she's going into shock and can't really stop it from happening even as an ambulance and EMTs pull up to scene. Even as they tell her to calm down, the thought runs through her head that screams with reality and all the clues that have been so subtly dropped.

(The apartment is warm when they return, but her skin feels so incredibly cold that she lets Tommy bundle her up in a comforter on the couch while they wait for Oliver to come home.

Only he doesn't come that night.

He doesn't come the next either.)

After two days, Laurel, while outwardly calm, is frantic inside, wondering if Oliver'd been hit during the attack, if he was injured. If he was hiding out somewhere, tending his wounds—and she's almost perfectly right.

Jonathan Black is brought down by Green Arrow and then Oliver is there, standing in the doorway to the apartment with a hooded expression that makes her want to hug him, but she knows from previous experience that touching him before he's ready to welcome the touch will end with someone (her) in a chokehold followed by extreme amounts of apologizing. So she waits as he opens and closes his mouth no less than six times, then...

"I'm sorry."

It's the cue, the chance for her to move and she yanks him into the room, closing her arms around him. "Oh, thank God. Don't you ever disappear like that again, you ass."

"She was flipping out," Tommy adds, his tone deadly serious and they all know that she wasn't the only one who was panicked.

Laurel kisses his cheek and says, "You have so much explaining to do."

"I know."

"Seriously," Tommy says, "I had to tell her everything I knew under threat of defenestration," and "It'll be an interrogation under a bare bulb for you."

Oliver smirks and Laurel relaxes finally. Just the sight of it is enough to let her know that he's okay and that things will be okay, regardless of whatever terrible thoughts had paraded through her mind in the two days he'd been gone.

They linger there, in the foyer by the elevator, for a few more minutes, before Laurel pulls back enough to kiss him hard, possessively, and tells him, "You'll eat, then you'll sleep, then you'll tell me everything so I'll know how to protect you."

(This night is their best night and it ends with Oliver sandwiched between his lovers, safe and sound and asleep.)


End file.
